The Climate Conversation We’re Not Having

Is there a conversation around climate change and our survival – that we’re not having? That you’re not having? Could we invite that conversation and hold it live and online, face to face but perhaps around the globe?

Bill Kauth and I were imagining a conversation around climate breakdown (as some are calling it) and the human future – the conversation we’d really like to have. It’s not so much about carbon in the air or rising seas, stuff we know about (though not NOT about them, either). It’s about what we don’t know about yet. We wanted a welcoming “room” for what’s showing up inside us when we consider the future for ourselves, our family – even human family since we belong to that too. A welcoming room where it was OK to talk about that without having all the answers, or even any of them.

This conversation is rare. My friend Heidi Hendersson did a series of in-depth interviews with sustainability students who, to a person, weren’t able to imagine a survivable future for themselves and their work. And they’re budding sustainability professionals! They had no language to talk about the human future because there had been no place for it. Bill and I wanted to create a pilot project to build such a place. One where we could sit with this question of climate and survival, for ourselves and others who wanted to sit with us. An experiment.

Not a gloomy room, not at all, but a room to welcome this strange guest, the unknown future and share how it is for us to be in relationship with it. What might we learn?

We wanted others who might come of their own choice into that conversation. There are no inducements or promises. This will be a welcoming space we hope, with every meeting in the spirit of the future we’d like to have. Our fear was that nobody would show up.

If you are interested, give us a call or email and let us know. There’s no dollar cost. We’re imagining a maximum of 12 people, and four 90 minute video calls in April, likely Tuesday mornings but that could change.

A word about us: With his wife Zoe Alowan, Bill Kauth builds bonded, long term, local communities. He’s also co-founder and Visionary-at-Large for the Mankind Project, a self-discovery adventure weekend that over 70k men have gone through. Graduates participate in over 1000 active ongoing Integration Groups.

Andrew MacDonald has been exploring and hosting online groups for some time. My book Evolutionary YOU: Discovering the Depths of Radical Change is about the personal and social possibilities of new conversation.

Bill writes: In his book Andrew introduces the “we-space” in a brilliant and original way that begs for an experiment. Given that both he and I have been climate activists for many years it feels like that is the appropriate overall topic of this very open exploratory conversation.